Mrs. Audley again (treated naturally and with a pleasant artlessness by Miss EMILY BROOKE) did not take very kindly to the conquest of her scruples and gave little suggestion of the rapture of surrender.  Further, the authors paid a poor compliment to English gentlemen by providing the Captain with a dull boor for his rival.  The contrast was a little too patent.  Even so Mr. FRANKLIN DYALL might perhaps have made the role of Sir Nevil Moreton appear a little less impossible.  But, however good he may be in character parts or where melodrama is indicated, he never allowed us to mistake him for a British Baronet.  The only person (apart from le Briquet) who contributed nothing to the general gloom was the Dean’s wife, played with the most attractive grace and humour by Miss NINA BOUCICAULT.

A note of piquancy was given to Mr. DU MAURIER’S part by his broken English.  “Broken” is perhaps not quite the word, unless we may speak of a torrent as being broken by pebbles in its bed.  There were momentary hesitancies, and a few easy French words, such as pardon? pourquoi donc? c’est permis? alors, were introduced to flatter the comprehension of the audience; but for the rest his fluency—­and at all junctures, even the most unlikely—­was simply astounding.  Few people, speaking in their native tongue, can ever have commanded so facile an eloquence.  What chance had a mere Englishman against him?

The action of The Prude’s Fall was supposed to take place in 1919, but its atmosphere was clearly ante-bellum.  Anyhow there was no sign of the alleged damage done to our moral standards by the War.  But nobody will quarrel on that ground with Mr. BESIER and Miss EDGINTON, the clever authors of this very interesting play.  And if we have to be taught how to behave by a Frenchman, to the detriment of our British amour propre, there is nobody who can do it so nicely and painlessly as Mr. DU MAURIER.

“WEDDING BELLS.”

I begin to suspect that the possible situations of marital farce are becoming exhausted.  Certainly we have lost the power of being staggered by the emergence of an old wife out of the past.  But Mr. SALISBURY FIELD, who wrote Wedding Bells for America, is not content with a single repetition of this ancient device; he must needs give us these intrusions in triplicate, showing how they affect the career of (1) the hero, (2) his man-servant, (3) a poet-friend.  True he only produces two old wives; but one of them, being a bigamist, was able to intrude “in two places” (as the auctioneers say).

The wife of Reginald Carter (Mr. OWEN NARES), having first run right away from him and then apparently divorced him for desertion (I told you the play was American), turns up on the eve of his marriage to another.  He has barely recovered from his failure to keep his future wife in ignorance of his past when he has to start taxing his brains all over again in order to keep his past wife in ignorance of his future.